MapR Hauls $30M for Enterprise Big Data

It's time for Big Data to make a serious push into the corporate data center, argues MapR Technologies. And the startup is attracting the financial backing to ensure that it stays at the forefront of the movement.

San Jose, Calif-based MapR closed a $30 million Series C round led by Mayfield Fund, bringing total investments in the company to $59 million to date. Lightspeed Venture Partners, NEA and Redpoint Ventures, all prior investors, backed the funding round.

The funds will help fuel the company's continued research and development efforts, as well as an expansion into Asia Pacific where MapR reports strong growth. But what MapR really has its sights set on is the enterprise data center.

In a statement, MapR CEO and co-founder John Schroeder said, "Organizations across industries have experimented and tested various use cases on Hadoop. Now we are entering a new phase where the focus is on production deployments, which calls for the broad support of applications that MapR uniquely provides."

Mayfield Fund's managing director Navin Chaddha says that if there's a company that can ride Hadoop's popularity into broader enterprise adoption, it's MapR.

"By delivering on the promise of Hadoop, MapR has propelled big business to embrace Big Data," he states. "With the large market opportunity for Big Data, estimated by analysts to reach $5 billion by 2016, we believe that MapR is in a great position to emerge as the Big Data platform of choice for enterprises."

MapR offers an enterprise-flavored -- and hence paid -- Hadoop distribution that emphasizes high performance, data integrity and high availability. Aimed at business-critical deployments, MapR's software can lay claim to touching "90 percent of the Internet population monthly" and handling "over a trillion dollars of retail transactions annually," according to the company.

In August, Tableau announced MapR support for its visual analytics platform. Ted Wasserman, a Tableau product management team member, explained some of the reasoning behind his company's decision to embrace MapR in a blog post. "For example, the MapR storage services layer supports the Hadoop FileSystem API and the NFS interfaces, allowing a customer to choose the distributed filesystem that best meets their needs."